And part of it was that neither Anna Garron nor I trusted each other. The physical aspects of our relationship were like play-acting, like a smoke screen thrown up to make the other party feel that there was no chance of anything going wrong.
My angle was that I was tired of being a hired boy. For years I had been a good kid, full of confidence in the future, and it hadn’t paid off. I knew that the kids I had gone to high school with, all the people I knew, were laughing at Brian Gage who couldn’t finish college, who spent four years working up to be a pfc, who couldn’t even stay on the cops, and who ended up as a hired boy for one of the rackets.
I wanted to stop that laughter, but quick. I was in touch with a little deal that was bringing in six hundred thousand a year — a million, when you count everybody’s cut — and I was making ten thousand. With the extra dough I could make, I was going to buy respectability. I was going to invest in local businesses. I was going to marry Kit and buy a big house on the hill over town and they were going to point to me and say, “Brian Gage had a little trouble getting started... but when he did!”
That was the way I wanted it.
And the only trouble with the plan that Anna and I made was that she wouldn’t let me in on all of it; she kept some of it to herself.
When she clicked the light on up in the living room, I glanced at my watch. It was quarter after eight. She brought the bottle in from the kitchen and poured a shot for each of us. I cut mine with water, but Anna liked hers straight. She smiled at me, tosed it of, and made a face. “Now to go out and get rumpled by that big clown,” she said.
The big clown was Homer Windo, Jr. He was the son part of Windo and Son, Printers. They ran a dusty little print shop at the foot of Baker Street near the tracks. The biggest standing order in their shop was the weekly hundred thousand tickets for Brock.
I had seen Homer the son several times when it had been my job to pick up the weekly batch, to take them back to be stitched. He was a big, brown-haired guy with a white face, a huge firm jaw, and a surprisingly weak and petulant little mouth that was always moist and red. His daddy ordered him around the shop as though he were some sort of half-witted puppy. His big white hands were always stained with ink, and he usually had a smear of ink somewhere on his big wide face.
“Are you sure you’ve got him hooked?” I asked.
“Don’t low-rate my charms, darling,” she said. “To him, I am a poor but honest girl who is getting slave wages working in a dishonest business trying to get my weak, embezzling brother off the big hook. He got tears in his eyes when I told him about it.”
“But will he come through?”
“Tonight I get the blank tickets. He’ll have to wait for a chance to swipe the type and ink.”
The tickets are printed on a press which is so arranged that each time it banks down, it prints a new five digit number. Homer Windo, Jr., was fixing it so that instead of printing on the face of the ticket, it would print on a hunk of cardboard, and then he was swiping the blank tickets, so that when the numbers came out, the wining number could be printed on freehand.
“That’s a nice story you gave him, Anna.” I looked into her eyes. “And what’s the real story?”
“The witness refused to incriminate herself.”
I got up and poured us fresh drinks. She knocked hers off before I could even pour mine. “As long as you think he’s hooked...” I said.
“That big clown has been trampled on for years. This is his chance to put one over on the powers that be. Besides, he thinks that as soon as I collect on the tickets, I send some of the money to my brother and he and I run away on what’s left. He wept on my shoulder and said that he’d even dig ditches for me.”
“Let me review the great plan,” I said, sounding more calm than I felt. “One — you heard from Brock that there is internal trouble in the syndicate and they aren’t as strong as they once were. Two — you have found some smart money around town that you won’t tell me about, some person or persons who will back the new pool. Three — you get the fake tickets and print them up; I arrange for a chump to turn them in, for a small cut. Brock has to pay off; the syndicate men come down to investigate, and some blank tickets are planted among Brock’s stuff. That gets rid of him. Four — I turn honest and give the whole deal to Miss Robinson, who feeds the information to the DA, giving him enough to set up a raid and knock over the house, the printers, the stitchers and pick up a lot of the less reliable salesmen. Five — then we get the new tickets printed outside of town and set up our own organization and we are in operation before the syndicate can do anything about it. And once we are operating, we don’t let them scare us out.”
“That in several nutshells, is it.”
“And why don’t you tell me who the smart money is?”
“Because then you would know, and if you were suspected and anything goes wrong, I’m quite sure that Brock could make you talk.”
“You also speak English.”
She stood over me, her hands on her hips. She said softly, “But I am also faster, tougher and more sure of myself than you’ll ever be, Brian.”
“It sounds as if you don’t trust me.”
“And that’s my privilege, darling,” she said.
I reached up and gently pinched her throat with my thumb and forefinger. Her eyes blazed. “And if you get funny baby, I have privileges too,” I said.
But even as I did it, I knew it was to melodramatic a gesture; my bluff was showing. She slapped my hand away and said, “Get a cap-pistol, junior, and we’ll play cops and robbers.”
Half an hour later I dropped her near the small drugstore where she had arranged to meet Homer. As I drove away, I glanced back. She looked slim, young, lovely, under the street light; hate and greed wear fancy clothes sometimes.
I headed for Kit Robinson.
Chapter Three
It is an odd and lonely thing to drive down a quiet, faded street where the houses need paint, and the children, playing in the night shadows, make small hoarse sounds — and see, behind the familiar elms, the house where you grew up.
That room on the second floor on the side: Quinn and I had shared that room. Banners on the wall, and mechano set under the table by the window. And the quiet grey woman is dead; her big husband is dead; there are strangers in the house, and nothing is ever the same.
Except that Kit Robinson still lived diagonally across the street, and her house was still green with white blinds.
When I had still been on the force, I had been a welcome visitor. “Why, hello, Brian! Come right in. Kit’ll be down in a minute. Oh, Kit! Brian’s here, honey.”
But then the papers had a little spread about a cop who got tight on duty; there was a picture of the mess I had made of the prowl car, and they had found me drunk, it seemed only fitting that I should spend a good portion of my time getting to that state again. I went back and worked in the yards for a time, but everything was sour.
Kit’s father had ordered me out of the house, with Kit standing, white-faced, at the foot of the stairs, her heart in her eyes and tears on her pale face. And when I started to get next to the wise money, Mr. Robinson’s mind didn’t change. He had a pretty shrewd idea where the money came from.
I drove slowly down the street, turned in a driveway and parked in the spot we had decided on several months before. I knew that she was up in her room with the door shut, looking out her window toward that spot. Her window was the only one in the house which faced it.